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when the times required them to pick up rifles alongside their men and defend the family compound from marauders; the kind who worked themselves harder than mules, then outlived the mules and the men by thirty years.
    “That’s what you say now ,” sang Evelyn, and pecked a good-bye kiss in her mother-in-law’s direction.
    Evelyn was closer to the truth than she knew. For that same evening, when Mrs. Santangelo confronted Joseph over the dinner table, she said nothing about feeding a horse off her wedding china. Instead she ticked the facts off on her fingers.
    “One.” She started at the pinky. “The Falconettis haven’t got a pot to pee in. Two: The girl’s no beauty, that you can see yourself. And number three”—she waited for Joseph to stop chewing—“You don’t win your wife in a pinochle game.”
    “What’s number four?”
    “Number four is: How could you bring children into this world with that lousy Falconetti luck?”
    If there was one thing Carmela Santangelo knew about, it was luck. An expert on good and bad fortune, on benign and malicious influences, she knew precisely where to look for the Evil Eye and how to prevent it from looking back. No one was more conscious of hunchbacks, albinos, suspicious configurations of liver spots and moles. Mrs. Santangelo could spit three times and make the sign of the horns so discreetly that someone could be standing inches away and never notice.
    Stronger even than her faith in God was Mrs. Santangelo’s passion for serving and protecting her family. And though she had lost her battle with Zio’s cigars, she never stopped fighting the mischievous and invisible forces which threatened her boys. From birth, her sons wore silver cornuti around their necks and were forbidden to remove them even in the shower. When Augie was an infant, his mother cured him of pneumonia by hanging a lamb’s hoof from his crib. Superstition had turned her mind into an adding machine, perpetually counting sneezes, steps, pigeons, potato eyes, orange pits—and reading portents in the totals.
    “Number five: The meal that girl cooked. Raw meat, sandy greens, a hair on the tomato—every one of those things is a bad omen.”
    “Don’t worry,” said Joseph. “The kids will be half Santangelo.”
    “Joseph. Take some more sausage.”
    Of all Mrs. Santangelo’s arcane information, perhaps the most magical was the recipe for her homemade sausage which, like some powerful magnet, drew customers from upstate New York and the eastern tip of Long Island. This formula—passed down, like the augury, through generations of women—was the mainstay of the family business, and included the specification that the cook must work rapidly, crossing herself often and trying not to think of the exact proportions lest someone read her mind.
    That morning, as soon as Evelyn gave her the bad news, Mrs. Santangelo had started a fresh batch of sausage. With every pound of pork, every pinch of pepper, fennel and paprika, she had willed her son to change his mind about Catherine. Calling in a passing schoolboy, she’d sent three pounds across the street to thank the Falconettis for their hospitality. Then she’d gone back upstairs to fry some for Joseph’s dinner.
    Now, waiting for her sausage to work its magic, Mrs. Santangelo decided to help it along.
    “And number six.” She flexed the fingers of her left hand and held her right thumb beside it. “You don’t even know the girl.”
    This last point hit Joseph so hard that he forgot to swallow and inhaled his food. Hurrying over, his mother pounded his back and with every slap, Joseph thought: She’s right. He didn’t know Catherine Falconetti from the Blessed Virgin Mary. For all he knew, she could be stupid, insane, lazy in bed, a shrew and a nonstop talker. Or maybe he was the crazy one, marrying a total stranger to collect on some drunken old man’s pinochle bet.
    And then, for the first time that either of them could remember, his